When I was a kid, I was surrounded by roaches and mice. It was so bad that anytime I left my house, I’d shake off all my clothes to make sure there were no critters on me. It happened once or twice that I’d be on the train, and a roach would crawl out of my shirt. That was dreadfully embarrassing. So it should come as no surprise that eventually, a roach went inside my ear.
We discovered this one day when I woke up with intense pain in my ear. I was young, and while I can’t remember the pain itself, I remember being taken to the hospital because of it. I think we went to Lebanon Hospital in the Bronx. The doctors examined me to figure out the cause. They used the otoscope to look inside, and one of them seemed to notice the issue.
At one point, I saw a doctor come over with some tweezers. They didn’t say anything about what was being done, probably because they thought I might be upset. One of them tilted my head and gently used the tweezers, then they pulled them out and showed us a dead roach. Honestly, that was shocking. I think they may have prescribed some medication just in case, and everyone got a bit of a kick out of the situation. Everyone except me. I really had a dead roach in my ear! Thankfully it died and didn’t crawl in deeper. I remember reading that roaches can’t crawl backward, so it kind of makes sense the thing got stuck, but wow, that was scary!
Anyway, if you have a persistent earache, don’t ignore it; it might be something unexpected hanging out in there! LOL.
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